Is it possible to stop IIS7 from logging certain IP addresses?
We have a large amount of dynamic links in our Google Adwords account (over 250,000) and they are visited by the Google Bot nearly every day leading to huge amounts of entries in the web log, so I would like to stop visits from the bot being logged.
Thanks.
No, this is not possible as far as I know. However, it's trivial to write a log cleaner, or to use off-the-shelf analytics software to exclude IPs.
Related
I have a web-server with 50+ domains hosted. I am trying to find a tool that would give me some stats on incoming traffic for those domains. I know I can install a separate Google analytics code into each of those but that's just too much work and the reporting would be tricky. I want to see all domains in a single report/dashboard. Whats' the best way to do this? I think I could use Google cross-domain tracking but I thought I'd ask here if any better alternatives around?
If you do not have Google Analytics 360, the best solution is to track them separately and create an external dashboard (e.g. data studio) that collects information from the various Properties and displays it in one place.
If you track everything in Google Analytics Standard within the same Property, with all those domains and depending on the volume of traffic, the risk of seeing sampled data in non-standard reports is almost insured.
I'm very new to online analytics. I just deployed a site a few days ago, told no one, and Google Analytics is saying I have hundreds of users and sessions all over the world.
Even if events are logging from my own development, there shouldn't be so many users (and so many sessions...I'm not developing THAT vigorously.)
Also, my server logs indicate the level of activity I expect: ~0. So it's not like I'm magically getting traffic somehow. It really is nonexistent.
What could be going on? I can understand seeing a few sessions here and there, for web crawlers, but I don't understand why the numbers are so high.
Any common gotchas?
I realize this is a vague question, but I'm not sure what other information to provide, so please let me know what I can do to help.
Traffic source
First check, if traffic comes through your website (through your analytics.js library). To do this, just remove analytics.js for a while and check, if traffic is still going into Google Analytics (e.g. Realtime report).
If is still going, maybe somebody use Measurement Protocol to spam your account.
To prevent this, add, for instance, custom parameter into your call and create filtered view only for this. All without this param, throw away.
Check sessions and returning visitors
Check, if the traffic is random (usualy one pageview per session) or if the behavior of users is normal.
Custom client ID
Check if you dont play with client ID in analytics.js configuration. IF you dont have random number generator there.
Check traffic source (referal), browsers
If there is one significant, or there is some pattern in versioning (absolute randomness is pattern too)
Preventing random access through website
For every visitor who is first-time on your page, set up a cookie with current timestamp. If cookie is not older than e.g. hour or day, do not track this user. Or buffer hits and fire them later after you prove the user is real.
Anyway, if you have some new hints or information from your analysis, we should help you better. This is still like reading a magic sphere :-)
There is a lot of resources here and on the web explaining how to avoid biaised statistics coming from referals such as Darobar, semalt, iloveitaly, etc. and how to block these malicious bots.
My question is not about how to prevent it to happen. I don't understand WHY i'm getting spammed. What is the interrest of these companies / entities to flood my stats ? They must have a pretty big infrastructure (either servers or infected slave computers) to visit so much websites and so many times. But what is the purpose of all of this ? Is it financial ? malicious ? Just for fun ?
What are the risk for myself or my company ? Can I be disqualified by Adsense or another online advertising program ?
Those bots don't generate ad traffic, even if they do, google and ad companies detect them, I used to work in adserving. Again google, yahoo and major ad serving systems take precautions to prevent fake traffic etc.
Those bots basically searches for things like email adresses, contact information in short any kind of information. Dont forget google uses bots to crawl internet which they have google search engine.
Some bots place comments on higher ranking sites for SEO work.
This is just a big business.
if you want to avoid them, take a loot at here : http://www.robotstxt.org/faq/prevent.html
However, these are just standarts and some folks dont care about them. But then i wouldnt really worry that much.
Spammers are trying to get traffic to their sites. Very often curious webmasters visit "referring" websites, and spammers can show them advertising, or redirect them to sites like amazon.com or alibaba.com to put affiliate cookie (and get revenue in case their targets buy something later).
I am most interested in an answer for Android, though it would be great to know if the answer is generalizable to websites, iOS, etc. Can I anonymize IPs (using setAnonymizeIp()) in Google Analytics and still track unique visitors? I understand Google Analytics uses cookies for websites, and so I thought it might be possible (or perhaps even automatic).
Yes. The only effect that the anonymizeIp function is that it instructs Google to remove the last octet of the IP address from it's logs.
So, if your user's IP is:
123.45.678.90
And you run this function, Google will store it as:
123.45.678.XX
The only practical effect is that this results in less accurate Geographic reporting, but that's it. It won't affect counts of unique visitors in any way, and is totally unrelated to how GA tracks unique visitors, since Google Analytics does not rely on IP addresses for unique visitor identification. For websites, maintaining unique user identification is done by the Google Analytics cookies. In this specific case, the Google Analytics Android SDK handles the user session management for you using a local storage mechanism analogous to cookies.
I dont know if the accepted answer is correct. I've enabled setAnonymizeIp myself on my app, and it had a huge effect on my analytics results.
Pages/visit shot up.
Visits halfed.
Avg time on site shot up.
Ip address is not the value used to identify a unique visitor/user on Google Analytics, so it shouldn't be an issue. Analytics uses a unique identifier in a cookie or mobile app data so attach to all of the user's hits in order to identify as a unique visitor, so I don't see a reason why ip masking should affect it.
Is there a way to keep one's IP excluded from Google Analytics logs even when it occasionally changes ? I'm asking because even if I was informed that my IP changed I would still find boring to go each time in GA to update the IP.
The best way to do that is using a blocking cookie. You'll have to execute some js code from your domain and create a filter in analytics:
http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55481